The California Faculty Association Bargaining Team is pleased to announce that late Wednesday night we reached a tentative agreement on the faculty contract

with management negotiators for the California State University.

On Thursday, the CFA Bargaining Team voted unanimously to recommend that the CFA Board of Directors forward this tentative agreement to union members with a recommendation to vote “yes” for ratification. The CFA board meets tonight and will take up the recommendation.

The agreement contains many positive gains for all faculty members in the CSU and will, we believe, enhance the faculty’s ability to provide quality public higher education to our students.

After years of economic drought, our salary package not only starts us down the road to recovery but will provide much-needed raises to hardworking CSU faculty.

The agreement provides that all faculty will receive a General Salary Increase.

In addition, there is a system-wide Equity Program aimed at addressing inversion and compression.

The package also includes a Salary Recovery Adjustment for tenure-track faculty whose salaries are below the Salary Service Increase maximum, for temporary faculty with three-year contracts whose salaries are below the SSI maximum, and for coaches with six or more consecutive years of service whose salaries are also below the SSI maximum.

The agreement also fixes misclassification of Lecturers who have languished in extremely low-paid salary ranges.

For years two and three of the contract we will reopen negotiations to discuss salary again. This reopener provision allows us to use our economic weapon, strike, if we are unable to reach an agreement with CSU management.

While we know that economics are uppermost in people’s minds, we also are pleased that the tentative agreement has improvements to address other areas that are important to our lives.

For the first time, we have gotten the CSU administration to recognize that we all have been suffering from growing demands for work in scholarship, service and teaching. We have agreement from the CSU to invest money in several faculty-administered workload relief programs including one designed to address the specific needs of probationary faculty.

In addition, the program will serve more senior faculty whose service and teaching loads qualify them for some relief. This is the first time we have been able to negotiate any workload assistance. While it will not solve all of the problems, it is a solid beginning which we hope can be enhanced in years to come.

These are just a few important highlights of this agreement.

Beginning next week, we will provide more detail. The tentative agreement in its entirety will be posted on the CFA website; officers and members of the CFA Bargaining Team will be traveling to campuses to describe the agreement and answer questions.

The next step will be a ratification vote by CFA members. More information will be forthcoming on that process.

The CFA Bargaining Team worked long and hard on this agreement, but all of us know that we could not have reached a resolution without the time, energy, effort and unity of our colleagues on each of the 23 campuses.

Congratulations to all of you who participated in demonstrations, who wrote messages to your campucs presidents, and who took the time to attend and speak at Board of Trustees meetings. We could not have reached this agreement if we had not all stood together in this fight.